For convenience, in case this changeover happened in mid-conversation, the above link refers to the last page of the prior topic, not the first._________________Plants are pithy, brooks tend to babble--I'm content to lie between them.
Super-short f.g.o checklist: Search first, strip comments, mark solved, help others.

I follow this topic for a while, because I have a laptop with Turion64 CPU and 64bit gentoo on it, and I/O performance is terrible - system load increases to 10 or even 15-20 on heavy disk usages and system is completely unusable.
I've been impressed that there's different "tricks" that decrease the problem and lot of them are for SATA (sd*) hard disks (with or without NCQ), but my laptop is with IDE hard disk and problem is fully present.
So am I missing something or problem is independent of hard disk type and is inherent for all types HDD?

I follow this topic for a while, because I have a laptop with Turion64 CPU and 64bit gentoo on it, and I/O performance is terrible - system load increases to 10 or even 15-20 on heavy disk usages and system is completely unusable.
I've been impressed that there's different "tricks" that decrease the problem and lot of them are for SATA (sd*) hard disks (with or without NCQ), but my laptop is with IDE hard disk and problem is fully present.
So am I missing something or problem is independent of hard disk type and is inherent for all types HDD?

those are more than 1 problem,

*) the problem with low throughput is related to a buggy firmware on several SATA-drives with NCQ

*) the problem with lagging / bad desktop interactivity is (seems) specific to the x86_64 / amd64 architecture and cfq and cfs (the cpu-scheduler) seem to be involved

for i in `pidof X` ; do renice -10 $i ; done
for i in `pidof kwin` ; do renice -10 $i ; done

Where is the best place to have this run automatically at start-up? The window manager starts too late to renice it from a init.d script and since it requires root privileges can't easily be done after login.

Anybody else running bfs?
I am currently running a 2.6.31.1 with the bfs-240 patch applied.
It now works for me and is pretty responsive as far as I can tell _________________System: AMD Phenom II X4 840, 16GB RAM, NVidia GeForce GT 520, ASUS M4A87TD/USB3, Raid, Seagate Constellation ESAMD64 system slow/unresponsive during disk access...

BFS solves the problem completely for me. It doesn't make it better; under the kind of loads that used to still create problems even with the few kernel versions that were better, the mouse jerkiness and frame skipping in videos simply doesn't appear.

Things that used to be problematic and now are fine:

- copy stuff over SMB
- check out linux git sources
- paludis -s

It is now impossible for me to reproduce the problem.

I'm using the latest zen-sources._________________It isn't enough to win - everyone else must lose, and you also have to rub it in their face (maybe chop off an arm too for good measure).Animebox!

BFS solves the problem completely for me. It doesn't make it better; under the kind of loads that used to still create problems even with the few kernel versions that were better, the mouse jerkiness and frame skipping in videos simply doesn't appear.

Things that used to be problematic and now are fine:

- copy stuff over SMB
- check out linux git sources
- paludis -s

It is now impossible for me to reproduce the problem.

I'm using the latest zen-sources.

Does it also solve the dd if=/dev/zero of=dump problem where the system locks up as soon as RAM is full?

They are available in portage (my portage tree shows .31-r4 is the latest one), as well as from the overlay, zen-sources. I found BFS helps, but I'm not sure it eliminated the problem. Then again, I haven't done any sort of concrete testing...

... no can't be true .... ..... ... .... ... Oh my God. It actually seems to work. I tried out the things that were annoying me for almost 2 years now and my system remained responsive. Usually when I write a big (>5GB) file with mmg to harddrive or copy them click response time in most applications is between 10-30s. mmg window doesn't get refreshed until its finished after several minutes and videos don't play proberly. Now I can surf easily with firefox, even play a movie with no visible delay and the mmg window is updating as expected. I'll report back if something changes....I still can't really believe that this is true.

EDIT: It's a shame the vanilla kernel doesn't accomplish this. Thanks to the ZEND Guys! I love you right now!

EDIT2: Moving a 8GB file still increases the response time of applications. For example smplayer open file dialog reacts after 3-4s but this is acceptable. Still much better then 30s. And video still plays smoothly.

... no can't be true .... ..... ... .... ... Oh my God. It actually seems to work. I tried out the things that were annoying me for almost 2 years now and my system remained responsive. Usually when I write a big (>5GB) file with mmg to harddrive or copy them click response time in most applications is between 10-30s. mmg window doesn't get refreshed until its finished after several minutes and videos don't play proberly. Now I can surf easily with firefox, even play a movie with no visible delay and the mmg window is updating as expected. I'll report back if something changes....I still can't really believe that this is true.

EDIT: It's a shame the vanilla kernel doesn't accomplish this. Thanks to the ZEND Guys! I love you right now!

EDIT2: Moving a 8GB file still increases the response time of applications. For example smplayer open file dialog reacts after 3-4s but this is acceptable. Still much better then 30s. And video still plays smoothly.

Can you post what options did you compile kernel with? I'm running zen-kernel-2.6.31-r4 and performance is not much better.
I've noticed (but not 100% sure) that if I leave my PC alone, and not working on it for a couple of hours, when I get back the PC is very slow.

... no can't be true .... ..... ... .... ... Oh my God. It actually seems to work. I tried out the things that were annoying me for almost 2 years now and my system remained responsive. Usually when I write a big (>5GB) file with mmg to harddrive or copy them click response time in most applications is between 10-30s. mmg window doesn't get refreshed until its finished after several minutes and videos don't play proberly. Now I can surf easily with firefox, even play a movie with no visible delay and the mmg window is updating as expected. I'll report back if something changes....I still can't really believe that this is true.

EDIT: It's a shame the vanilla kernel doesn't accomplish this. Thanks to the ZEND Guys! I love you right now!

EDIT2: Moving a 8GB file still increases the response time of applications. For example smplayer open file dialog reacts after 3-4s but this is acceptable. Still much better then 30s. And video still plays smoothly.

Can you post what options did you compile kernel with? I'm running zen-kernel-2.6.31-r4 and performance is not much better.
I've noticed (but not 100% sure) that if I leave my PC alone, and not working on it for a couple of hours, when I get back the PC is very slow.

you need to select BFS (as a CPU scheduler instead of the stock-scheduler CFS) and select BFQ for the i/o-scheduler

kernel-config:

Code:

# CONFIG_CPU_CFS is not set
CONFIG_CPU_BFS=y
CONFIG_CPU_BFS_AUTOISO=y
# CONFIG_BFS_CUSTOM_RR is not set

Well it's not as good as in the first test. This time I had to hash a ~6GB file and there were big delays. I had a flashvideo in firefox running and another movie in PAL and the hash. Firefox didn't react to clicks for more than 1min until the hash was finished, the flash video ran with no problems, the movie stopped about every 15s for 1-2s but i think with the old kernel it was much worse, the movie would freeze completely and run for 1-2s every 15s.

Overall it seems to be better but I didn't make any identical benchmarks. I simply try things that used to lock my system. So maybe my first test was somehow different and that is why it ran so flawlessly.

I've noticed (but not 100% sure) that if I leave my PC alone, and not working on it for a couple of hours, when I get back the PC is very slow.

I think this is not caused by a faulty IO scheduler. I have the same behaviour. I think the RAM is simply cleaned of not accessed desktop applications and when you come back it needs to reread libraries from the harddrive. Can anyone confirm that?

EDIT2: OK, seriously.. .... Sorry guys. This is the second time I thought the problem was kind of solved. Now, I did three "comparable" benchmarks with my old 2.6.30-gentoo-r1(1), linux-2.6.31-zen4 CONFIG_CPU_BFS_AUTOISO=n(2) and linux-2.6.31-zen4 CONFIG_CPU_BFS_AUTOISO=y(3). The benchmark: Dumping a file from hdd A to hdd B, vieweing a movie from hdd A and hdd C, viewing the same flashvideo and hashing a file from hdd A and hdd B with sha256sum.

The result (just my subjective perception): 2 and 3 makes no difference, 1 is a little worse, but not as worse as I would have expected. I think I need a more detailed automatic benchmark with measurable results to make further statements, as my previous claims turned out to be false.